REVOIR PARIS (aka PARIS MEMORIES) – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

It feels like a precious gift, the latest film from French director Alice Winocour, a delicately constructed journey through trauma and recovery that cuts like a knife and soothes like a hug, somehow, miraculously, managing both bundles of feeling at the same time.

Paris Memories (aka Revoir Paris) is unexpectedly gentle about the thing that it’s about: the shattering of mundane normality that is modern urban terrorism. At least after the sharp shock of how Winocour depicts the shooting spree at which Mia (Virginie Efira) is present. No quarter whatsoever is given to those who perpetrate violence, and rightly so. They are not even afforded the human dignity of faces… and rightly so. We are wholly with Mia — we are Mia — while gunshots and screams echo as she cowers under a table; the gunmen are nothing more than briefly glimpsed anonymous legs and feet stalking the restaurant where she’d stopped for a drink on her way home one evening. We hold our breath with her as she plays dead, hoping to survive the next few minutes… Continue reading…